Softest parts of her

Make it good.

April 12, 2017

I think two cups of coffee does the trick when Tuesdays feel like Mondays and Wednesdays feel like Mondays. Two should be good, right? No, two is good. Anymore than that it’s like you’re excited for a birthday party when you were 6 and your mother promised it would be a Barbie girl sleep over. There’s no other way to describe the feeling. It’s like that all day. I mean all day and you just hope to be over productive when you consume that much coffee. Responding to emails, attending the staff meeting with actual open eyes, just being in the state of mind where you can do all things. But it’s impossible to sit still and concentrate, so you day dream about all the ways the sun would feel good against your bare skin in the middle of a cool spring month. How light layers of dewiness allow petals to cover arms and legs or how the blue skies never seem to end. The strength in a good cup of coffee is a lesson I have learned through years of working. If the portions are just right, it’s like a secret compartment of energy is released into the mind and the ferocity behind each calculated move is amazing. It’s like Frankenstein coming back to life, but it’s me screaming “I’m alive!!” I was taught how to make good coffee from working nights at the hospital with my 3 Cuban Mothers. The type of Latin mothers that critique your every move to make sure their satisfaction is your ultimate goal. The type of Latin mothers that will remind you even your best is not enough. But there’s love and lessons they taught each time I made this damn coffee. I mean what’s really a cup of coffee going to teach about life? I’ll tell you one thing though, there’s nothing better than a good cup of Cuban cafecita in the middle of a 10hr night shift to give you that extra burst of energy to make it to 6am. Every night at midnight we began the ritual of prepping our brown aromatic magic. The lab would fill with such a pleasantry that everyone knew it was time to break. It’s a gathering amongst tired souls in the break room as we begin to hit that half way mark, where we finally get to meet the sun and the stars under the same sky together. My mothers instructed me to use three cups of water and 4 scoops of Pilon with the intent to not be able to see the bottom of the coffee pot. The richness in flavor, the explosion in taste, there’s an art to creating a good cup of coffee. Every night we perfected the craft, without missing a beat. With laughter surrounding the lab break room, the constant chatter of exhausted conversation and the impatience to finally be able to have a damn cup of coffee, everyone’s night depended upon this pot. Explaining why the sugar had to be melted down first with a little bit of the coffee was a task in itself. Learning to swish the combination together until the sugar has dissolved and proceeding with filling your cup y understanding the definition of calmate when it’s screamed across the lab. The night is young and what’s most important in these early hours is our sanity because in 30minutes 6 floors of the hospital with be awakened and doctors will be demanding results. I’ve kept this ritual with me even years after I left the hospital. With the stresses of the day, working two jobs and doing grad school full time, creating the time to make a good cup of coffee is essential to the makings of a better me.